Inside America’s Education Revolution

From the Free Press.  It’s a 2 minute read.

Many of the greatest American success stories started in a public school classroom. Presidents like Harry Truman, LBJ, and Ronald Reagan. Legal giants like Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, and Steve Jobs. But is our school system the great engine of meritocracy it once was? Consider the following:

• Two-thirds of fourth and eighth graders aren’t proficient in reading, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a.k.a. “The Nation’s Report Card.”
• Absenteeism nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023.
• Between 2018 and 2023, American students’ math scores dropped 13 points, reaching the lowest U.S. levels since international comparison records began in 2003.
• An independent assessment in 2023–24 shows eighth graders would need a full year to catch up to pre-pandemic levels—which is basically impossible.

American kids deserve better. And American parents are increasingly looking for the freedom to choose an education system worthy of their trust.

Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska all have school choice on the ballot this November. In Texas, school choice legislation has faced an uphill struggle, but the state’s governor says it’s poised to pass. If it does, Robert Pondiscio, a former public school teacher and current senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says the Lone Star State could be the most important “domino” to fall in what he calls “the choice revolution.” Given Texas’s size, should it join the other school choice states, this could mean “almost literally 50 percent of families in this country having the ability to privatize their child’s education using public dollars.”

But opponents of school choice, including teachers unions, say these laws direct resources away from public schools in need toward families who can already afford private education. Some say school choice is part of a right-wing agenda. Last December, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, went so far as to say school choice is “undermining democracy and undermining civil discourse and undermining pluralism.”

The truth is that in recent years the K–12 public school system has received $190 billion in additional federal funds—and sadly, they don’t have much to show for it. As the Defense of Freedom Institute documented in its July report, many public schools have wasted this money: Boston’s public school system used its Covid handout to hire at least 16 administrators, including a “staff wellness manager” and an “ethnic studies instructional coach and coordinator.” Milwaukee Public Schools bought 2,200 ukuleles, funded a “race-conscious teaching project,” and created a four-person “Gender Identity & Inclusion Department.”

In 2022, Minnesota elementary school test scores dropped below the national average for the first time in decades. As for the governor’s priorities? In 2023, former teacher Tim Walz signed a law requiring first-graders to “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power”; fourth graders to “identify the processes and impacts of colonization” and “resistance movements”; and high school students to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness.”

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has pledged to adopt a Parental Bill of Rights that would include “a form of universal school choice.” Exactly what that means on a federal level is unclear.

Meanwhile, millions of American parents aren’t waiting for politicians to fix this problem. Instead, they’re taking the education of their children into their own hands—pulling them out of the public school system and enrolling them in a range of new alternatives.

One alternative we’re exploring today is microschools. These are the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteenth-century “one-room schoolhouse,” where kids of different ages and abilities are taught together in a single classroom. Francesca Block was on the ground in Florida where one microschool entrepreneur expressed her hopes that soon “anybody can have a microschool that brings that kind of tailored experience of having a private tutor.”

Read Frannie’s report on “The Return of the One-Room Schoolhouse.” 

Next, America’s first-ever Jewish classical school opened in New York City. The classical-education movement comprises more than a million students of diverse backgrounds. But Emet Classical Academy is unique in its blend of Torah studies with a liberal arts program steeped in the Western tradition. Peter Savodnik, reporting from the academy’s convocation, writes: “There was something missing in American schools, public and private, and it wasn’t just a matter of books or subjects, but mission.”

Read Peter’s dispatch: “Inside America’s First-Ever Classical Jewish School.”